A finished sponsored video is only part of what a marketer weighs when choosing a creator. Detroit creator RV Mendoza points this out on his blog. A marketer, he says, also needs to know the context: how the series of posts the video belongs to performed, and how the audience responded to it. The content created around a finished job can therefore help sell the next one.
A public breakdown of a job serves as a reference for the next brand
Mendoza builds on a concept that newsletter author Brandon Smithwrick calls a “receipt”. It is a public record of completed work from which a potential client can tell how a project came about. Mendoza develops it into a breakdown in which the creator writes up, for a sponsored post, what brief they received, how they solved it and how the audience reacted. A brand that is only considering a collaboration then gets a clearer picture of the creator. Smithwrick writes the newsletter Content to Commas for entrepreneurs and founders who want to “run their content like a business”. Among others, he has worked with the brands Amazon Business, Notion and Hootsuite. Forbes included him in its North American 30 Under 30 list for 2024 in the marketing and advertising category.
A standard portfolio shows the finished result. According to Mendoza, a breakdown adds the decisions that led to it.
Mendoza illustrates this with his own campaigns. For a collaboration with the chickpea pasta brand Banza, he reports, as of the time of measurement, over 24,600 views, 239 comments and 238 shares. For the campaign around the arrival of the Sheetz chain in Michigan, he recorded 892 shares and comments in which people discussed food, recalled their orders and asked since when Sheetz had operated in Michigan. Another brand can see from this what people talked about under the posts and judge whether such an audience suits its product.
Breakdowns can also keep working long after publication. According to Mendoza, Smithwrick says older posts bring him potential clients even months later, because people keep finding them. A single text can thus reach clients who have not yet heard of the creator.
European brands and agencies choose creators mainly by content style and audience composition
For brands, a public breakdown has practical value. The survey State of Influencer Marketing in Europe 2025, published last November by the platform Kolsquare together with NewtonX, drew responses from 613 marketers with decision-making authority at brands and agencies. When choosing a creator, what decides most often is the style of their content, cited by 61% of respondents. Next come audience demographics at 51% and engagement rate at 49%. According to the report, follower count barely appears among the main criteria. This matches brands’ interest in creators’ expertise, which Creator’s Hub wrote about in August.
A creator who publishes a breakdown of their work gives a brand some of this information in advance. It shows the results of a past campaign, the audience’s reaction and how the creator thinks about a brief, before the brand’s first message even arrives. Mendoza sums it up in the line “The writing becomes part of the brand’s due diligence”. A published breakdown thus gives a brand one of the inputs for a business decision. The figures in it, however, are published by the creator themselves. A lack of reliable data in general is, according to the Kolsquare report, among the difficulties that trouble roughly a third of brands when working with influencers.
Three quarters of European marketers were planning to work with more creators this year
According to the same survey, demand for creators in Europe is growing. For 2026, 75% of respondents planned to work with more creators, and 86% said they work with micro-influencers. As brands widen their pool of creators, it may become harder for an individual creator to stand out through reach alone.
According to the report, 89% of brands manage their influencer work partly or entirely in-house, while 61% of brands also rely on agencies. An in-house team is therefore often involved in selecting creators. A publicly available breakdown can save it time that it would otherwise spend tracking down references.
A creator who shows how they think and how a specific audience responded to their content approaches their work much like a company that documents its references. Smithwrick’s motto “run their content like a business” can thus show up in practice as a verifiable trail of completed work.
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